Women-Related Places in Washington, D.C.
By: Miriam Edelman
People can visit some locations with major ties to women in the nation’s capital. This piece does not include every such landmark.
Entire Museums
Washington, DC 20002
The Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument (BPWENM) describes “the story of a community of women who dedicated their lives to the fight for women’s rights.” The BPWENM was the headquarters of the National Women’s Party for over 90 years.
Washington, D.C. 20004
The Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office Museum is where Clara Barton, a nurse who founded the American Red Cross in 1881 and was its President for 23 years, lived and worked during the Civil War. In 1865, Barton set up the Missing Soldiers Office, which received more than 60,000 letters. Before the Office closed in 1867, Barton and her staff had found more than 20,000 missing soldiers. In the Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office Museum, which opened to the public in July 2015, visitors can participate in a guided tour and see preserved rooms.
Washington, D.C. 20008
Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens is the former home of Marjorie Merriweather Post (MWW), the only daughter of the founder of Post Cereal. After MWW’s parents died, she was the owner of what became the General Foods Corporation. MMW held parties at Hillwood and also had an estate in Mar-A-Lago in Florida. At Hillwood, people can visit MWW’s mansion, multiple gardens (including the multi-level Japanese-style Garden and Rose Garden), dog cemetery, and other buildings. Visitors can also see exhibits and attend events.
Washington, D.C. 20001
Mary Church Terrell, a native of Memphis, lived in this house. She was the President of the National Association of Colored Women and founded the NAACP’s Executive Committee. She was the first African-American female to be appointed to a school board. When Terrell was 86 years old, she was the leader of the movement to integrate eateries in the nation’s capital.
Washington, DC 20005
Mary McLeod Bethune Council House was the National Council of Negro Women’s first headquarters from 1943-1966 and Bethune’s final home in the nation’s capital.
Bethune, the first person in her family to be born as a free person and the first to have a formal education, was a leader in civil, women’s, and human rights. She also was the first African-American female to be President of a college. She was elected the National Association of Colored Women’s eighth national President. She founded and was the first President of the National Council of Negro Women, Inc. She was the Vice President of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League. At 61 years old, Bethune became the first African-American to lead a federal agency when President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed her to the position of Director of the Division of Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration.
At the Mary McLeod Bethune Council House, visitors can take a guided tour of a historic house. The Council House was the National Association of Negro Women’s first headquarters.
Washington, DC 20005
The National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) is the world’s first museum that is focused only on “championing women through the arts.” Opened in 1987, the NMWA highlights significant women artists of the past and current women artists. It contains exhibits and hosts events. One set of NWMA events is NMWA Nights, which occur during the third Thursday of every month. At NMWA Nights, visitors can listen to a performance, go on a tour, make art, and enjoy refreshments.
Museum Exhibits/Displays
The First Ladies (at the National Museum of American History)
Washington, DC 20560
The First Ladies exhibit describes First Ladies, the wives of the Presidents. It contains gowns that were worn by First Ladies.
Julie Child’s Kitchen (at the National Museum of American History)
Washington, DC 20560
This part of the FOOD exhibit contains the Cambridge, Massachusetts, kitchen of cooking legend Julia Child. Through her books and television shows, Child encouraged individuals to care about cooking and food. Child referred to her kitchen, her favorite room, as the “beating heart and social center of her household.” Some of Child’s shows were filmed in this room. Tools from the 1940s through 2001, when Child donated this kitchen, are displayed.
Others
Washington, D.C. 20006
Daughters of the American Revolution Constitution Hall (DAR Constitution Hall) is D.C.’s largest concert hall. In 1890, the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) was founded “to promote Historic Preservation, Education, and Patriotism across the United States. Since the Society's founding, more than one million women have found purpose and passion in DAR membership.” People can visit the DAR Library and attend DAR Library Lectures at the DAR Headquarters. Opening in 1929, the DAR Constitution Hall has had many performers, including Joan Baez, the Beach Boys, Mary Chapin-Carpenter, Bob Dylan, Duke Ellington, Aretha Franklin, Elton John, Patti Labelle, and U2.
Washington, D.C. 20004
A statue of Eleanor Roosevelt is located in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial. This statue depicts Eleanor Roosevelt standing near a United Nations emblem. Beneath the emblem is the following inscription: “Eleanor Roosevelt, First United States Delegate To The United Nations.” The following quotation of her husband is left of the statue: “The Structure Of World Peace Cannot Be The Work Of One Man, Or One Party, Or One Nation … It Must Be A Peace Which Rests On The Cooperative Effort Of The Whole World.”
Helen Keller, Ann Sullivan, and Polly Thomson were interred in St. Joseph’s Chapel in the Washington National Cathedral. A small plaque says: “Helen Keller and her lifelong companion Anne Sullivan Macy are interred in the columbarium behind this chapel.” The same text is also in Braille. Thomson was Keller’s companion.
Keller was born in Alabama on June 27, 1880. When she was just 19 months old, she lost her sight and hearing due to an unknown illness. On March 3, 1887, 20-year old Anne Sullivan, who also had vision problems, became Keller’s teacher. Sullivan taught Heller by signing into Keller’s hand. In 1904, Keller became the first deafblind individual to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree cum laude from Radcliffe College. Sullivan helped Keller until she died in 1936, at which time Thomson took over. Aside from writing an autobiography and other pieces, Keller was an activist, opposing U.S.’s involvement in World War I and supporting women’s rights. For forty years, she worked for the American Foundation for the Blind. She met with U.K.’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill and other world leaders. Keller received multiple honorary degrees and an honorary Academy Award. Keller died in 1968.
Sheridan Circle NW between Massachusetts Avenue NW and NW 23rd Street
Washington, DC 20008
The Letelier-Moffitt Monument commemorates Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen Moffitt. On September 21, 1976, when Letelier, a critic of Chile’s dictator Augusto Pinochet, drove his passenger and co-worker Moffit around Sheridan Circle, their car exploded from a remote-control bomb, planted by Chile’s secret police.
In 1981, the three-foot tall granite memorial was created close to the site of the explosion. On the Sunday closest to September 21st, a commemoration ceremony occurs at that monument.
Washington, DC 20003 (Lincoln Park)
The Mary McLeod Bethune Memorial, which has the first statue of an African-American in the nation’s capital, was unveiled in 1974 on the 99th anniversary of the birth of Mary McLeod Bethune. This memorial depicts Bethune with a cane in her right hand and a scroll, a symbol of education, in her left hand.
Washington, D.C. 20036
The Nuns of the Battlefield Monument memorializes the nuns who cared for wounded and ill Civil War solders. Dedicated on September 20, 1924, the monument includes life-sized depictions of 12 nuns on a big bronze relief panel.
Rotunda
U.S. Capitol
The Portrait Monument in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol memorializes women’s suffrage, honoring Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In February 1921, Congress accepted the monument, a gift of the National Woman’s Party. Stanton was credited as the primary organizer of the Seneca Falls Convention, which the Library of Congress referred to as “the first American women’s rights convention.” Mott and others also helped organize this landmark conference. According to the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, that convention “became best known for its demand for women’s right to vote” At the convention in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848, Stanton said:
“We are assembled to protest against a form of government, existing without the consent of the governed – to declare our right to be free as man is free, to be represented in the government which we are taxed to support, to have such disgraceful laws as give man the power to chastise and imprison his wife, to take the wages which she earns, the property which she inherits, and, in case of separation, the children of her love; laws test against such unjust laws as these that we are assembled today, and to have them, if possible, forever erased from our statute-books, deeming them as a shame and a disgrace to a Christian republic in the nineteenth century.…”
Stanton and Anthony founded the American Equal Rights Association, and later, they helped cofound the National Woman Suffrage Association. Along with Matilda Joslyn Gage, Stanton and Anthony wrote the History of Women Suffrage. Stanton and Anthony also led the National American Women Suffrage Association, the result of a merge of the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association. Anthony is the first non-fiction female on U.S. currency.
U.S. Capitol
The Statue of Freedom is a bronze statue of a “a classical female figure with long, flowing hair wearing a helmet with a crest composed of an eagle's head and feathers.” The 19 feet 6 inches tall statue is located on top of the U.S. Capitol. A full-size plaster model, which was utilized in the creation of the bronze statue, is in Emancipation Hall in the Capitol Visitor Center.
21st St. & Constitution Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20007
The Vietnam Women’s Memorial commemorates “the 265,000 military and civilian women who served around the world during the Vietnam World.” The memorial, the National Mall’s first and only memorial to military females, is part of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Dedicated on November 11, 2013, the memorial depicts four figures. The memorial is next to the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, which commemorates eight females who perished during that war.
Final Thoughts
Learn about historic women while visiting these and so many other places -- schools that are named after females, many statues, and areas of the National Portrait Gallery, the National Museum of American History, the National Museum of African American History & Culture, the U.S. Capitol (National Statuary Hall Collection and others), and more.
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